Being a Dancer is Hazardous

Being a dancer is hazardous. You have to be all anorexic and do seventy hours of exercise on two meals of frozen grapes and loo paper (you’ve got to get your roughage from somewhere). You have to do very scary things on a daily basis, like throwing yourself high into the arms of a man who may or may not be inebriated (I used to have a dance partner who was rather fond of ethanol) or indeed, a man who is more interested in the hot guy that just walked in than making sure that you do not die as a result of flinging yourself head first into the ground (yes Sean I’m talking to you!). You always have bleeding toes and purple knees and feet that look like they have dipped in acid and then battered around by footballers.

But for me, the most hazardous thing about being a dancer is that there is a 90% chance that at some point you will develop a weak bladder and wet yourself and thereby alienate yourself from society and live in shame as a recluse for the rest of your days and never experience love or laughter or booty calls at three in the morning or corndogs and best friends and life in general.

I suppose I should elaborate.

You see, us dancers have a very special way of dressing. It is called layering. Dancers will do this both in summer and winter (although in winter it can reach ridiculous proportions). We do this mainly to be cool (not cool as in temperature but cool as in ‘awesome’) and ‘dancery’. Dancing is an extremely competitive profession and so this translates to being competitive about the number of layers of clothing you can stuff onto your body. It can get nasty and has been known to lead to overheating, dehydration and even death!

“Ooh look at me I’m a dancer, I’ve got on seven layers of clothing!”

“Well I’m a better dancer than you because I have on eleven layers! In fact, that makes me a better human being than you!”

This is all good and well but when it comes to going to the bathroom it can get seriously tricky. I have been dancing since the age of four and to this very day I experience what I like to call the “Dreaded Downward Pee Spiral”.

You wake up in the morning and you go to the loo. It is simple and uncomplicated and you barely think about it. You start to get ready for class. Here you are faced with one of two options;

#1 You can get dressed in normal clothes and take your dance clothes with you, thereby precipitating a need to take with you approximately seven bulging sports bags.

#2 You can wear dance clothes underneath your normal clothes which makes you look approximately 5 kilos heavier than you actually are (which is really damaging when you’re trying to promote your image as an anorexic).

So you get to the studio and you start class. After a few minutes you start the de-layering process but if you are awesome you will still be rocking at least five layers of clothing.

By the end of class you will be wearing only a few layers of clothing. The more layers you shed during class the more awesome you are.

During class you drink lots of water. You sit and stretch and you have some more water. You might have some fruit juice with a muffin. At this point you are blissfully unaware of the painful chain of events you have started. It is like the butterfly effect…but way worse. Chaos theory on crack.

At some point you vaguely register the fact that you need to pee. You are not desperate however, and the thought of struggling through all 57 layers of clothing to complete this simple task hardly seems worth it. You blithely carry on with your day; disaster is on the horizon but you cannot see it.

You will be sitting eating a yoghurt or you may be checking your email at the library. One second you are just a normal girl being anorexic and wearing 78 layers of clothing and the next something just snaps! It’s like someone grabs your urethra and is like “OMG what does this do?” and you feel like you are for sure going to have spontaneous bladder explosion. To alleviate the now colossal pressure on your urethra you wiggle around and change positions and zip your pelvic floor or whatever the hell it is they tell us to do in Pilates and pray to the gods of ammonia that you can make it to a bathroom in time.

So you start running and trying to remove articles of clothing as you go. If you were a normal civilian person this task would be simple but as a dancer it is like trying to solve a rubix cube…with a grenade in your bladder! It’s like and episode of 24! Racing against the clock and playing Russian poo-lette!

So you get to the bathroom but then you have to grapple with the door! The bathrooms were obviously built for willowy anorexic types so it’s quite hard for a normal-sized person to actually get into the cubicle. You open the door and you manage to get one leg in but you can’t get the rest of your body in without closing the door so if someone were to walk in they would find a near-hysterical person jammed into a door and gasping with exertion like a fat dude on a treadmill.

You eventually manage to batter your way into the cubicle and escape with most of your skin (although the door certainly claimed some skin off your left arm and a bit of your face) and a minimum of bruises. But the battle has only just begun. You now look in despair on the layers of clothing that lie between yourself and bladderly freedom. Unfortunately this requires logical thinking; something which is in short supply with me in the most mundane of situations (which means that basically I’m fucked). So the first thing you do is take off your coat. You then grapple with a tight jumper which will reveal a long sleeved vest. Once the vest is off you can begin to tackle your onesie (this is an incredible invention which although fantastic for dancing in, is detrimental to peeing…it is basically an adult-sized romper). So you start to pull down your onesie but something impedes your progress. By this time you are nearly crying from frustration and exhaustion. You realise that you are still wearing a waist elastic so you pull up your onesie again to grapple with the tight elastic but your bulimic arms hardly have any fight left in them and it takes a further two minutes to get the damn elastic off your body. You are now free to rip off your onesie…or so you think. Just as you get to your calves you realise that you are still wearing leg warmers which have been wrapped around the legs of your onesie. In a urine induced rage you rip the legwarmers and onesie of in one fell swoop.

You look down at yourself in desperation. Your bladder feels like someone is playing in it with a supersoaker and a paintball gun and you can practically feel it expanding into your uterus…that can’t be healthy. You prepare for your second assault; all that remains between your bum and the toilet seat is shorts, a leotard and stockings. The shorts are easy enough and they are flung into a corner of the loo on which there is invariably water on the floor. You then contemplate your stockings…they can only be removed once your leotard is down. You start taking off your leotard (which, for those of you who are not savvy with the lingo, is basically a swimming suit) and are on the verge of wetting yourself but the leotard will get tangled in your haste and there will be an epic five round fight: dancer versus lycra. If you are lucky you will win this fight and once your leotard is off you can rip down your stockings and PEE!!!

It is the best feeling in the world. You sigh the sigh of a wholly satisfied person. You have no troubles in the world, you don’t even care that you are completely bum naked in a public building. You can breathe again, the pain in your bladder subsides and you feel like you can take on the world.

But then you look around you and take in the carnage that your epic battle has wrought. It will take you a good ten minutes to sort out the snarled tangle that your clothing has become. You realise that half the items are now also damp with toilet-floor water and that you will have to put everything back on again. It is an exhausting and depressing thought.

You have been gone for a good half-hour and people are starting to wonder where you are. You walk into rehearsal.

“You’re late.”

“Well fuck you!!!”